The Modern Lovers

1977

40

If there’s one thing this world will always need, it’s a late-night driving anthem, and Modern Lovers features one of the best. Two chords are enough gasoline for “Roadrunner” to soundtrack any expedition and reaffirm a weary traveler’s will to push ahead. Although Jonathan Richman is something of a weary traveler himself, his knack for extracting love and humor from portraits of mundane Americana and teenage disarray goes unmatched. Patched together from various sessions with John Cale in 1973, the Modern Lovers were defunct by the time their self-titled record had its belated release three years later, but its emotional honesty and musical prescience hadn’t (and hasn’t) waned.

Richman laid the pretext for the wry, self-deprecating indie icons of the 1980s and early ’90s; he was the first to stiff-arm rejection, exalt the suburbs, and topple rock stardom’s lofty pedestal of unattainable coolness. It’s difficult to listen to Slanted & Enchanted without feeling Richman’s shockwaves in Stephen Malkmus’ beer-slackened laments, or appreciate Spoon without hearing the honky-tonk piano pop of “Hospital” or the hand-clapped hustle and bustle of “Someone I Care About.” Collegiate and consciously sophomoric, there are few rock albums today so refreshingly unalloyed or innocently timeless. –Sam Ubl

Suicide

1977

39

Nothing about Suicide made sense. Nihilist electro-rockabilly? In 1977? And what was up with the sunglasses? We’ve all heard what a glorious shithole New York City was in the ’70s, and Suicide’s highly theatrical project wallowed in the filth. The blood-curdling screams in the 10-minute murder fantasy “Frankie Teardrop” (aka Taxi Driver: The Musical) get most of the ink, but the pretty stalker anthem/prom night bloodbath theme “Cheree” is just as disturbing. Most of the above comes courtesy of Alan Vega’s expressionist vocal performance, but Martin Rev’s churning electronics were of equal importance. His unusual keyboard tone referenced the sound of ’50s rock’n’roll in a brilliantly subliminal way while the cheap drum loops pointed to a future of relentless, trance-inducing repetition. Suicide have been called the American Kraftwerk but every one of their highways led to a dead-end piled high with twisted metal and charred bodies. –Mark Richardson

Drums and Wires

1979

38

The method is there in the title: By ditching their keyboardist and adding a second guitarist, XTC defined themselves by propeller-armed drums and a skin-cutting guitar sound. It’s pure pop disguised as jittery post-punk, all played with teeth-chattering intensity. The aesthetic is so tight that even the forgettable tracks serve it, but the album also boasts some of the band’s strongest early material. Colin Moulding’s biggest single (“Making Plans for Nigel”) serves as the commercial front for outro, neo-political epics on which Partridge wrings his vocals like laundry and spits out vowels like golf balls. Here, XTC also defined their version of a love song: Stuttering boys are so staggered by the sight of spectacular girls that their feet don’t touch the ground. Dozens of other contemporary bands were more extreme in every way—angrier, more danceable, more adventurous or primitive or whatever—but this triple-jointed sock hop out-charms them all. –Chris Dahlen

My Aim Is True

1977

37

It says a lot about just how bloated rock had become by 1977 that Elvis Costello’s debut album could pass as punk—its most enduring songs are an aching romantic ballad (“Alison”) and a slinky, reggafied romp (“Watching the Detectives”). And beyond those twin peaks, Costello’s backing band—the uncredited Clover—pumped out the sort of good-time pub rock that their past and future frontman, Huey Lewis, would glitz up when they eventually morphed into the News.

But if Costello didn’t exactly embrace punk’s nihilistic worldview, he shared its disillusionment with rock’s increasingly ponderous, navel-gazing nature. My Aim Is True is a rescue mission, saving the music from impending irrelevance by reinvigorating old sock-hop tropes with modern anxieties: wage-slave woes (“Welcome to the Working Week”), male inadequacy (“Miracle Man”), lingering post-war fascism (“Less Than Zero”). “I’m not angry!” Costello insists ironically on the album’s nerviest song, but that iconic album cover—of Costello wielding his guitar like a bayonet as if he were Bloody Holly—betrays his real intent: this isn’t mere rock’n’roll, this is war. –Stuart Berman

Wish You Were Here

1975

36

Flush and exhausted from the unexpected success of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd resolved to shake things up a bit. For the follow-up, they entered the studio with no conventional instruments, intent on recording a new record comprised entirely of ostensibly normal songs composed on common household objects. Thankfully, they realized after a couple of weeks that it wasn’t working out. One of their experiments with wine glasses is audible under the initial surge from Rick Wright’s magisterial synthesizer, but the rest of the album finds the band spinning road-tested material into studio magic. They bookended three of their finest songs with an epic tribute to Syd Barrett, who himself made a tragically confused appearance at the studio during the sessions. Despite its cinematic sweep and cosmic jamming, Wish You Were Here is ultimately the sound of four men caught in the grinding of a wheel much larger than themselves and striving to understand it, only to find that they know its machinations all too well. –Joe Tangari

Y

1979

35

Twenty-five years after their untimely implosion, the Pop Group’s lacerated funk has begun to make a noticeable dent in the indie strata. Y, the Bristol post-punk band’s trainwrecked opus, has been co-opted and realigned by the more nefarious members of the disco-punk revival—most notably Liars on 2001’s They Threw Us in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. Yet neither Liars nor any of their contemporaries have come close to matching the effectiveness of Y’s arid doomsaying. Unlike most of the late-’70s no-wave types (and perennial imitators), the Pop Group were less concerned with eschewing convention than with vehemently eviscerating it. Listen to how they tear apart a boxy, reverb-laden surf riff on “We Are Time” with Dadaist malice and contempt. It’s impossible to ignore Mark Stewart’s incessant Thatcher-bashing, but Y is so convincing in its hectoring that one can easily imagine it arising from even more amicable circumstances. This is a record of dire necessity, armed for combat against a long litany of ills—none more than typicality. –Sam Ubl

Saturday Night Fever

1977

34

If disco had a Beatles it was certainly the Bee Gees, although they never should have tried to make it official by raiding the wardrobe of a certain lonely hearts club band. The Bee Gees and the Beatles overlapped for a while in the late 1960s and early ’70s, anyway, but who knew then that Maurice and the Brothers Gibb were busting with dance beats? Maximum R&B, indeed. The first five songs on this double LP could be considered the greatest album side of all time—or at least, the public thought so, sending four singles to No. 1. At this point, the Bee Gees were hitting home runs every time they stepped to the plate (they have six dingers here) and there are enough good songs by other artists to make you forget the fluffy zeitgeist bombs that are David Shire’s instrumentals. In the record-as-cultural-event sweepstakes, no subsequent release has topped Saturday Night Fever. –Mark Richardson

Chairs Missing

1978

33

Trailing their landmark debut, Pink Flag, by only eight months, Wire’s Chairs Missing was a shock to the punk community that first embraced them. In a scene where “progressive” was a four-letter word, and keyboards and effects were weapons of the enemy, Wire bravely shrugged off their rudimentary roots and quested for something more. Critics and fans responded badly, and that Wire shared a label with Pink Floyd only added to their infamy.

With 25 years of hindsight, Chairs Missing is the most punk record they could have made, taking the scene’s ethics of defiance, disregard, and contempt to the greatest possible extreme. Though by no means a prog-rock opus, the album indulges in pedals, loops, and, yes, keyboards and synths, to brilliant effect, while retaining all of the pop immediacy, compositional integrity, and acute lyricism of its predecessor. Equal credit is due to producer Mike Thorne, who was responsible for squeezing these sounds of primitive machines, and Wire themselves, whose impatience and high standards pushed him to perfect the sounds they imagined. Hilariously, tying this into the whole of the list, Thorne recalls in an article on his website that “Wire said I should play synthesizers on the next album. I said, ‘I can’t move my fingers fast enough.’ They said, ‘If you don’t do it, we’ll get that Brian Eno in.’” This is one rare instance in which I can honestly say that would have been a huge mistake: He’d have killed all the joyous impulsiveness that makes this album one of the most charismatic, unpretentious experimental records the ’70s ever produced. –Ryan Schreiber

The Wall

1979

32

Pink Floyd responded to their outsized ’70s popularity by doing everything bigger, and everything about The Wall was completely over the top: It was a double LP, it was about childhood and drugs and stardom and World War II and death, it featured choirs and sound effects and an absurd amount of studio time, it was accompanied by a major motion picture and an absurdly complicated stage show. Few bands could get away with such grandiosity, but Pink Floyd were shameless in their ambition. And the energy driving that ambition was tearing the band apart.

As the ’70s wound down, the tensions between Roger Waters and David Gilmour were reaching the breaking point. Waters wanted grander concepts and heavier themes, and thought the band’s music should flow from their broader ideas; Gilmour thought about music first, how songs were constructed and played. The Wall was the last time Gilmour and Waters found a compromise. While it’s definitely Waters’ show and he wrote the lyrics and the bulk of the music—“Mother” and “Nobody Home” are particularly affecting— the album contains some of Gilmour’s most iconic guitar work (“Comfortably Numb,” “Run Like Hell”) and his most impassioned singing (“Goodbye Blue Sky,” “Hey You”). The melodic largesse was such that the album even had a smash hit single that completely owned the radio: “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” The album also felt like an ending, even if everyone involved had a lot more music left in front of them. Roger Waters’ reach would far exceed his grasp in the next decade (put on Radio K.A.O.S. sometime to see how low he’d sink), leaving The Wall as the moment where he was able to realize his craziest dreams. –Mark Richardson

Fear of Music

1979

31

“We’re in a funny position,” David Byrne told Rolling Stone upon Fear of Music’s release. “It wouldn’t please us to make music that’s impossible to listen to, but we don’t want to compromise for the sake of popularity.” Yet in 1979, Talking Heads were more popular than they’d ever been, as Fear of Music became the first album of what would become known as “new-wave” to break Billboard’s top 25.

So it’s odd that, with the exception of the politically charged “Life During Wartime,” Fear of Music is remarkably free of the kind of radio-friendly unit-shifters that marked their previous releases. Instead, Talking Heads’ nervous pop began to turn darker and more exploratory: Tracks like “I Zimbra” and “Animals” toyed with the African polyrhythms that came to full fruition on the band’s definitive statement, 1980’s Remain in Light, while the highly experimental “Electric Guitar” marched to an erratic, misshapen melody and producer Brian Eno’s alien effects. And yet, for every “Drugs”—whose minimalist creep was taken by an imposing stillness and suspended reverb—the album played host to a handful of brighter, more conventional pop tracks (“Cities,” “Paper”), including one of the group’s few ballads (the serene “Heaven”). Talking Heads’ most successful album, 1983’s Speaking in Tongues, was still four years ahead of them, but here, Byrne seems more keenly aware of the balance between the difficult and the approachable than anywhere else in their discography. –Ryan Schreiber